Prudential shutting down Assurance IQ | Inside the Binance founder’s sentencing | LinkedIn launches games

Prudential paid a whopping $2.35 billion to acquire Seattle-area insurance tech startup Assurance IQ in 2019. Now, five years later, Prudential is shutting down Assurance. The decision came “as a shock,” according to an internal email. Read more.?

SPONSOR MESSAGE: Washington state’s second-largest city is the hub of an ambitious regional tech community seeking to leverage new realities to achieve its longstanding goals. Read more.

Amazon beat expectations by just about every metric with its first quarter earnings, reporting revenue of $143.3 billion and profits of $10.4 billion. Amazon Web Services revenue grew 17%, with an operating income of $9.4 billion, helping fuel the bottom line. Read more.

• Related: Amazon keeping corporate headcount ‘flat’ but hiring in select areas including generative AI

Is four months in prison enough? That was the big question coming out of Tuesday's sentencing hearing in Seattle for Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao (above). The former CEO of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange received a fraction of the prison term sought by federal prosecutors for failing to implement legally required controls against money laundering. Read our report from inside the courtroom.

Take-Two Interactive layoffs: The gaming giant behind Grand Theft Auto is laying off 70 workers in Seattle. Read more.

Need more games to play during a work break? LinkedIn jumped into the mix popularized by The New York Times and is now offering three daily thinking-oriented games. The Microsoft-owned social platform views it as a way to increase connections. We tried the games?this morning.

Ex-Microsoft engineers Ashish Kurmi and Varun Sharma raised $3 million for their Seattle-based cybersecurity startup StepSecurity , which aims to help software developers secure their projects. Read more.

Former?Seattle Seahawks player Kerry Carter is tackling the CEO role at Atavus, the sports technology company that teaches proper football tackling technique. Read more.

Who will be the Next Tech Titan, or Startup CEO of the Year? You can find out May 9 if you attend the GeekWire Awards in Seattle, our annual celebration of the leading innovators, entrepreneurs, scientists and business leaders in the Pacific Northwest. Grab your last-minute tickets, and read about the finalists.

Hot Links:

• Amazon’s Ring introduced its first indoor camera that pans and tilts, with a manual privacy screen, available for the first time in a variety of colors. (Ring)
• Researchers at Amazon Web Services say they’ve come up with a method to scrub bad data from AI models after they’ve been trained. (Semafor)
• Washington State University researchers are using AI to analyze snowpack and water levels, to better predict future water supplies for farmers and others. (WSU)
• Microsoft and Sanctuary AI are partnering to develop AI models for the Vancouver, B.C., company's general-purpose humanoid robots. Sanctuary declined to say if Microsoft is investing. (Sanctuary AI)
• Amazon and Accolade are among the companies joining the Biden Cancer Moonshot program. (The White House)
• Seattle startup Coinme , which operates Bitcoin ATMs, announced $1 billion in retail sales since launching a decade ago. (Coinme)?

SPONSOR MESSAGE: Local Bank Offering A Frictionless Loan Application Process For Small Businesses in Washington State. 40-50% of small businesses rank access to capital as their main obstacle. Unlike traditional banks that tend to be encumbered by legacy tech, community banks can bring agility and innovation to small business lending. Learn how a Seattle-based financial institution leveraged open banking to offer a frictionless loan process for small business borrowers in Washington State. Learn more.

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